Ethan Mollick

Edward B. and Shirley R. Shils Assistant Professor

Assistant Professor of Management

Research Interests: crowdfunding, distributed and user innovation, entrepreneurial strategy, entrepreneurship in innovative industries, games and business, role of individuals in firm success, self-organization among individuals

Workers can build their careers either by moving into a different job within their current organization or else by moving into a new job within a different organization. We use matching perspectives on job mobility to develop predictions about the different roles that those internal and external moves will play within their careers. We propose that internal and external mobility are associated with very different rewards: upwards progression into a job with greater responsibilities is much more likely to happen through internal mobility, but external moves will nonetheless offer similar increases in pay, as employers seek to attract external hires. We also examine how these predictions change when moves take workers across job functions as well as when external mobility happens involuntarily. Analyses of data on the careers on MBA alumni are used to support these arguments. Despite growing interest in boundaryless careers, our findings indicate that internal and external mobility play very different roles in executives’ careers, with upwards mobility still happening overwhelmingly within organizations.

In fields as diverse as technology entrepreneurship and the arts, crowds of interested stakeholders are increasingly responsible for deciding which innovations to fund, a privilege that was previously reserved for a few experts, such as venture capitalists and grant-making bodies. Little is known about the degree to which the crowd differs from experts in judging which ideas to fund, and, indeed, whether the crowd is even rational in making funding decisions. Drawing on a panel of national experts and comprehensive data from the largest crowdfunding site, we examine funding decisions for proposed theater projects, a category where expert and crowd preferences might be expected to differ greatly. We instead find substantial agreement between the funding decisions of crowds and experts. Where crowds and experts disagree, it is far more likely to be a case where the crowd is willing to fund projects that experts may not. Examining the outcomes of these projects, we find no quantitative or qualitative differences between projects funded by the crowd alone, and those that were selected by both the crowd and experts. Our findings suggest that crowdfunding can play an important role in complementing expert decisions, particularly in sectors where the crowds are end users, by allowing projects the option to receive multiple evaluations and thereby lowering the incidence of "false negatives."

Crowdfunding allows founders of for-profit, artistic, and cultural ventures to fund their efforts by drawing on relatively small contributions from a relatively large number of individuals using the internet, without standard financial intermediaries. Drawing on a dataset of over 48,500 projects with combined funding over $237M, this paper offers a description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures. It suggests that personal networks and underlying project quality are associated with the success of crowdfunding efforts, and that geography is related to both the type of projects proposed and successful fundraising. Finally, I find that the vast majority of founders seem to fulfill their obligations to funders, but that over 75% deliver products later than expected, with the degree of delay predicted by the level and amount of funding a project receives. These results offer insight into the emerging phenomenon of crowdfunding, and also shed light more generally on the ways that the actions of founders may affect their ability to receive entrepreneurial financing.

Performance differences between firms are generally attributed to organizational factors – such as routines, knowledge, and strategy – rather than to differences among the individuals who make up firms. As a result, little is known about the part that individual firm members play in explaining the variance in performance among firms. The absence of evidence at the individual level of analysis also prevents a thorough understanding of which roles beyond those of top managers contribute most to firm performance. This paper employs a Multiple Membership Cross-Classified Multilevel Model (MMCC) of 854 computer games which account for over $4 billion in revenue to test the degree to which organizational or individual factors explain firm performance. The analysis also examines whether individual differences among middle managers or innovators best explain firm performance variation. The results indicate that variation among individuals matter far more in organizational performance than is generally assumed. Further, I find that variation among middle managers has a particularly large impact on firm performance, much larger than that of those individuals who are assigned innovative roles. These results demonstrate the importance of individual factors in explaining firm performance. The results also show that middle managers are necessary to facilitate firm performance in creative, innovative, and knowledge-intensive industries.

Every field has brief formulas or relationships that are useful for back-of-the-envelope calculations. Rarely do these maxims become popular knowledge; even more rarely do they become as ubiquitous and influential as Moore's law, the 40-year-old prediction that the speed of computers will double every year or two. Here, a look at the way in which the legendary law evolved into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Underground innovation communities, such as hackers and computer game modifiers have formed a unique type of information sharing community. As the nature of their communitions evolved to take advantage of new technologies like computer Bulletin Boards and the Internet, the social structure of these communities evolved as well. Understanding how these communities are internally socially divided into innovative "Elites" and follower "Kiddies" can shed important light on these influential, if sometimes destructive, underground electronic communities.